“Suffering News Burnout? The Rest of America Is, Too.” Or so The New York Times headed a story by Jim Rutenberg last month which purported to show that Americans were weary of serious news stories because they were tuning out the network news shows.
American soldiers are dying in Iraq almost daily, questions are continuing to swirl around the Bush administration’s case for the March invasion, and United States Marines are poised off the coast of Liberia.
At home, decisions by the Supreme Court prompted national debates on affirmative action and gay rights, a basketball star stands accused of sexual assault, and the California governorship suddenly hangs in the balance. And yet, television news viewers are tuning out.
Imagine how fed-up we must be with the news if we’re not tuning in to something as exciting as those swirling questions about the administration’s case for the March invasion! Yet I wonder that Mr. Rutenberg never thinks to ask himself whether it might not be precisely the media’s obsession with that case—to the exclusion of other things that actual news consumers might be more interested in—which is turning them off. But then why should he when it is so easy to conclude, in the words of Jack Wakshlag, the head of research at Turner Broad- casting/CNN, that “I’m not sure that national import and national interest always correspond”?
Very probably they don’t. But just because the rubes and hicks too unsophisticated to watch
